


through the very air

by childoffantasy



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: F/M, Flash Fic, Flowers, Fluff, I jettisoned all the parts of canon I don't like, Magic, Pre-Relationship, Show!Triss, Teaching, Worldbuilding, hand kiss, making magic make sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:34:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24939133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/childoffantasy/pseuds/childoffantasy
Summary: Only now, listening to Triss lecture on the Signs usable by any trained sorcerer, while Ciri peppers her with questions about the Signs all her teachers in the Keep have used in front of her, does Eskel truly connect the Signs all Witchers use with magic as used by a mage.Triss offers a first lesson in magic to Eskel.
Relationships: Eskel/Triss Merigold
Comments: 40
Kudos: 42
Collections: The Witcher Flash Fic Challenge #002





	through the very air

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a weekly flash fic challenge.
> 
> I have taken a certain amount of the canon around magic from Blood of Elves and twisted it to suit my needs. If Mr. Sapkowski's worldbuilding won't make any damn sense then I will impose sense upon it. This is very firmly Show!Triss but Eskel's pretty consistent from version to version (so far) so take your pick for him.

Eskel hadn’t had very many expectations when he began sitting in on Ciri’s magic lessons with Triss. He supposes he was hoping to learn more about the way Aretuza-educated mages understood the world around them, the library in Kaer Morhen being focused very tightly on the knowledge and skills useful to a Witcher on the Path, with only the occasional volume inherited from a Witcher with a particular interest. Eskel has long since read his way through everything the keep’s library has to offer concerning magic, so the chance to hear the fundamental lessons of a formal magical education seemed, when he began, to be a good exercise in broadening his horizons.

Eskel knows his Signs are particularly strong, he has known since shortly after the Trial of the Grasses when they began working with the newly mutated boys to feel and use the magic now available to them. He watched his classmates reach again and again for the well of power and come up short, heard them describe how the threads of control over the ability slipped through their fingers time after time and kept his council. As soon as Eskel had learned the shape of the power he was to use for Signs he found it ready to burst forth at his call, and for him learning control was often a matter of stemming the flow. As a lad he was not in the habit of questioning such things, he simply assumed it was like how Gweld was broader in the shoulder and could beat any boy in grappling, while Geralt was longer in the leg and could outrun them all, Eskel had the strongest Signs.

Only now, listening to Triss lecture on the Signs usable by any trained sorcerer, while Ciri peppers her with questions about the Signs all her teachers in the Keep have used in front of her, does Eskel truly connect the Signs all Witchers use with magic as used by a mage. In a moment his thoughts flash through a thousand different factoids he hadn’t realized were relevant. That time Vesemir mistakenly let slip Geralt’s mother had been some kind of hedgewitch. The way the boys never learned Signs till after the Grasses, which had killed seemingly at random, but all those who survived were capable of Signs. The Grasses were administered before puberty, before magical aptitude could manifest.

Triss ends Ciri’s lesson and sends the girl (young woman, soon) off in the direction of a snack before her evening chores, then eyes Eskel as she stacks the books she had Ciri read from and sorts her notes. Even lost in thought as he is, Eskel still can’t help being aware of her as she moves around the table towards his chair.

She’s a lovely woman. Physically, yes, even being less glamorous than some Aretuza mages Eskel has met. But. Triss obviously loves Ciri as deeply as the rest of them in this keep do, she’s a patient and gentle teacher, even through the worst of Ciri’s teenage moods. She did Geralt a lifesaving kindness some twenty years ago in Vizima and has refused to let him repay her, insisting it was the least she could do in return for the service Geralt had done for the crown of Temeria. Eskel is still not sure how a mage as well regarded as she has allowed herself to be persuaded to hide away in a northern mountain fortress with a bunch of Witchers (she’s even steadfast in the face of Lambert’s bluster, to Eskel’s continuing surprise and admiration). Even if Ciri is the last scion of the Cintran Royal Household, Triss has come very far out of her way to spend months in the Blue Mountains, especially considering she has sworn no oaths to the Cintran crown. The list of kindnesses Triss has extended to the Wolf school keeps growing and Eskel has the urge to find kindnesses to do for her in return.

Triss stands in front of Eskel where he sits, looking down a few inches and meeting his eyes curiously (she has never flinched from his scars).

“What has you so pensive, Eskel?” Her voice is light, curious, but he knows she will let the issue lie if he doesn’t care to answer.

He wants to answer her, though.

“I hadn’t until just now imagined the Signs we do are magic like they might teach at Ban Ard or Aretuza. If our Signs are magic in the conventional way and not something invented by the wizards who created the mutations, I wonder at the implications.”

The expression that crosses Triss’ face is not what Eskel expects. She isn’t surprised or pryingly curious, instead she mirrors his pensive mood for a moment, then smiles a little sadly.

“Not many of you survived the mutations, isn’t that right?” And Eskel knows she has come to some of the same conclusions he has. He would worry what most other mages might do with the knowledge but not Triss, she has held their secrets in trust without fail all this time.

He nods and they sit in silence with the ghosts of the castle for a few seconds, then Eskel speaks again, still watching Triss’ face.

“I have always been the most talented with Signs of any Witcher I know, and I wonder if we truly are limited to only Sign magic.”

“You have always had the most powerful touch of any Witcher I’ve ever met, surely these things are not coincidence.”

Triss’ face is bright and interested, and holds no trace of the detached, academic fascination Eskel hazily recalls from the sorcerers that lived in Kaer Morhen in his youth. He knows before she says it that she will work with him to see what abilities lie untapped in him, but she will experiment with him because he asked it of her, not because she wishes to make a research project of him.

They begin then and there. Triss rummages through her satchel for a brief moment and emerges with a silvery amulet, simply engraved with a few sigils, and suspended from a simple hemp cord. They stand facing one another and the part of Eskel’s mind that tracks body language notices that Triss’ breathing is carefully deep and measured as she presses the amulet into his hands and folds hers around his. Her skin is slightly cooler than his and her palms are soft compared to his work-roughened knuckles.

For a moment Eskel swears he knows what Triss means when she describes the magical emanations she experiences at the touch of a Witcher’s skin, her small hands feel electric on his own. Forcing himself to focus, Eskel turns his attention to the amulet and searches for a sense of it beyond simple touch, smell, and sight. It takes a long moment. The way Eskel reaches inside himself for a Sign feels akin to what he discovers he has to do to find the sense of the amulet, but it’s a change to direct that sense outward instead of inward.

When Eskel finds the sense of the amulet he is momentarily stricken as all of a sudden he cannot separate the amulet-feel from that of Triss’ hands, and his own magical core and the cord strung through the amulet and even the very air around them. He closes his eyes and breathes carefully and draws on decades of experience of dulling his own senses down to manageability and applies that to this suddenly expanded magic-sense. Opening his eyes, he sees Triss smiling delightedly up at him.

“Oh well done! Usually with young students it takes far longer for them to both find the feel of the magic, and learn to focus only on the system they wish to manipulate.”

“You could tell what I was doing, then?” Eskel didn’t keep the magic-sense open wide enough to get more than a glimpse of how the power was latent all around them, but he would not be surprised that it had nuances he could learn to interpret with time.

“Yes,” Triss is still smiling sweetly, “the patterns in magic around a student are pretty distinctive.”

They agree to one more brief lesson since the first one was such a success. This time Triss pulls a small flower from the vase on the library table, one of the mostly-decorative wildflowers she grows in a small corner of the greenhouse, “to bring some sunshine to the keep,” she says. The flower is reaching the end of its lifetime, its leaves almost entirely limp, and the petals beginning to shrivel. Triss has Eskel place his fingers around hers on the stem of the flower, then she uses her free hand to wrap the cord of the amulet around their hands.

“I expect you will have an affinity for that amulet now, so we can use it as a familiar point for you to ground yourself. All I want you to do is try and track the magic as I work with it. Notice where it comes from and where it goes, the patterns and directions it moves on the way from one to the other. Ready?”

Eskel nods and cautiously opens up his magic-sense a little way, beginning with the amulet, then expanding a little further. He’s fairly confident that the sense of Triss’ hand in his is a magic-sense this time, and not his more mundane hyperawareness of her touch. At her encouraging nod, Eskel expands his sense a little further to encompass some space around both of them and takes a moment to acclimate to the peculiar knowledge of the energy in the air, stone, and fabric of his environment.

Then Triss begins the magic she planned but refused to explain, saying he would learn better having no expectation of what he was about to see. She pulls energy, Chaos, from the air closest to her, and then farther out. Just a little bit at a time, carefully controlled and never pulling from any solid material around her, and then the concentrated power flows through her, up her arm to her hand and fingers where Eskel touches hers. Eskel suddenly realizes the skill required to channel that energy through the delicate systems of a human body without disrupting anything critical, and is briefly amazed that there are as many magic users in the world as there are.

Finally the power collected in Triss’ hand is guided gently into the daisy clasped in her fingers, and the magic revitalizes the flower, moving up the stem, branching into the leaves which brighten and become firm, then restoring the bloom from the centre out. This too is a delicate operation, fixing the weakened and shriveled parts of the plant without burning it up in a misapplication of power. It’s one of the most beautiful things Eskel has seen in his long life, the ebb and flow of the universe working to restore a little plant against the flow of time.

Eskel looks up from the daisy, sure his expression is doing something strange, and Triss gives him a private smile. “I know,” she says.

He lets his magic-sense fade away again, still amazed, while Triss unwraps the amulet cord from their hands.

“You can keep the amulet, it’s traditional to gift the first amulet a mage uses. You can keep this too.”

Triss leans up on her toes to tuck the flower behind his ear, on the scarred side. Eskel blinks, shocked once again, and furiously wills himself not to blush. The shivers racing up his spine have nothing to do with the way the temperature of the air around them dropped a few degrees while Triss worked. Her hand brushes the hair on that side softly, then settles carefully on his cheek. She is still breathing steady and even, but Eskel thinks her cheeks are a shade or two pinker than when she was doing her working.

Eskel does the only thing he can think of, which is to bring his own hand up to cover hers. A moment standing there looking at each other, and Eskel brings her hand down, turns it gently over, and leans down to brush his lips over her knuckles.

“Thank you,” he says. It hangs heavy with sweet meaning.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me about Trisskel! I'm [childoffantasy](https://childoffantasy.tumblr.com) on tumblr as well


End file.
